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Paulina Rowińska at Quanta:

The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms.

Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Earlier this year, researchers in Germany put forward a fourth hypothesis(opens a new tab) that they say solves the puzzle.

But does it? A consensus feels nearer but has yet to be reached. For now, the slippery problem remains open.

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Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review:

If you’re eccentric, you’re all right.” This is how Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, explained the British character to me as an expatriate South African. It was 1993, and we were sitting at the table in my Oxford kitchen with a microphone between us. My role, as a fellow biographer, was to ask Humphrey questions, and his answers, he hoped, would provide material for an essay. Along with other speakers at a biography conference, he’d agreed to contribute a piece to The Art of Literary Biography (due to be delivered to Oxford University Press), but Humphrey had a problem. His confiding after-dinner talk had brought up the issue of fraught relations with a subject’s family.
 
The talk, entitled “What Discretion Forbids,” had been about his involvement with the Tolkien family, who had authorized a biography back in the seventies. This book, a bestseller, was not the one Humphrey wrote initially. A protective family had refused to accept his version of Tolkien’s life.

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Nikhil Kalyanpur at The Price of Power:

Historically, economic elites pushed for stronger courts, better property rights, and even elections. There was an underlying logic: elites are fundamentally afraid of the state expropriating them, and domestic political development — the rule of law, democracy — can restrain arbitrary government action.

But recent elites are at best indifferent and at worst complicit in the democratic backsliding of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and now the United States. Some of that can surely be explained by today’s plutocrats expecting to make wins by aligning themselves with the government. Cash in some short-term gains for potential random punishment down the line.

But I think the main explanation is that elites no longer have the incentive to fight for the rule of law at home. They can buy it abroad.

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Christian Wiman at Harper’s Magazine:

A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term “species” is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight, and body mass index after being told their work counted as exercise, though their levels of activity were unchanged. Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know of in the universe, and the development of AI will have no bearing on this. The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness.

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Peter Bach in CounterPunch:

The persistent rumours that imprisoned Pakistani politician Imran Khan is dead have been crackling away like Lahore firecrackers these past few weeks. They feel less like revelations than the arrival of something long predicted. Or are they just the manifestations of an over-inventive public and mistrusted military?

Khan, if still alive, has come to resemble Julian Assange when Assange was in confinement. He is not so much an Assange-like selfless warrior as a nonetheless remarkable human being living only a parallel existence to the rest of us. He has become, in the public imagination at least, a man shimmering darkly from his prison cell like a character in a gothic novel.

And to think that Imran Khan was remarkable even before politics propelled him into this other light—now darkness—of a country that never seems truly at ease with itself. Remember, Pakistan emerged through a combination of Jinnah’s political leadership, British colonial decision-making, and the wider politics of Indian nationalism, communal angst, and the snuffing out of empire.

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Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

As AI wheedles its way into our lives, how it behaves socially is becoming a pressing question. A new study suggests AI models build social networks in much the same way as humans. Tech companies are enamored with the idea that agents—autonomous bots powered by large language models—will soon work alongside humans as digital assistants in everyday life. But for that to happen, these agents will need to navigate the humanity’s complex social structures.

This prospect prompted researchers at Arizona State University to investigate how AI systems might approach the delicate task of social networking. In a recent paper in PNAS Nexus, the team reports that models such as GPT-4, Claude, and Llama seem to behave like humans by seeking out already popular peers, connecting with others via existing friends, and gravitating towards those similar to them. “We find that [large language models] not only mimic these principles but do so with a degree of sophistication that closely aligns with human behaviors,” the authors write.

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Le Chien

I remember late one night in Paris
speaking at length to a dog in English
about the future of American culture.

No wonder she kept cocking her head
as I went on about “summer movies”
and the intolerable poetry of my compatriots.

I was standing and she was sitting
on a dim street in front of a butcher shop,
and come to think of it, she could have been waiting

for the early morning return of the lambs
and the bleeding sides of beef
to their hooks in the window.

For my part, I had mixed my drinks,
trading in the tulip of wine
for the sharp nettles of whiskey.

Why else would I be wasting my time
and hers trying to explain “corn dog,”
“white walls,” and “March of Dimes”?

She showed such patience for a dog
without breeding while I went on—
in a whisper now after shouts from a window—

about “helmet laws” and “tag sale,”
wishing I had my camera
so I could take a picture of her home with me.

On the loopy way back to my hotel—
after some long and formal goodbyes—
I kept thinking how I would have loved

to hang her picture over the mantle,
where my maternal grandmother
now looks down from her height as always,

silently complaining about the choice of the frame.
Then, before dinner each evening
I could stand before the image of that very dog,

a glass of wine in hand,
submitting all of my troubles and petitions
to the court of her dark-brown, forgiving eyes.

by Billy Collins
@AbeBooks

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Gréta Tímea Biró at Sapiens:

Dora and I walked through the quiet nighttime streets of Chow Kit, a downtown neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. [1] Pungent food smells mingled with the sweet scent of fruit and flowers from a nearby market. Abandoned rainbow-colored confetti shivering under the dim, yellowish streetlights reminded us of some celebration that took place earlier. [2]

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chow Kit was a bustling red-light district. Today only around 15 to 20 sex workers can be seen on any given night, according to Dora. The decline is due to a worsening economy and increased surveillance by Islamic authorities.

“Most hide from the religious police in these rundown buildings, hoping to find clients using apps,” she said. As we passed a police station, Dora explained that officers required bribes from each sex worker to allow them to work. A local mafioso further exploited them, demanding “protection money” while offering no real security.

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Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad at Digital Dopplegangers:

Most current digital doppelgängers, for all practical purposes, are automatons i.e., their behavior is relatively fixed with relatively well defined boundaries. I would argue that this is a feature and not a bug. The fixed nature of the automata is what gives them the feeling of familiarity. Now imagine if we were to take away this assumption and tried to incorporate semblance of some of autonomy in digital doppelgängers. In other words we would be allowing it to evolve and make its own decisions while staying true to the original person that it is based upon. A digital self trained on a person’s emails, messages, journals, and conversations may approximate that person’s style, but approximation is not equivalent to being the same. Over time, the model encounters friction e.g., queries it cannot answer cleanly, emotional tones it cannot reconcile, contradictions it can detect but not resolve. If we let the digital doppelgänger evolve to address these challenges, divergence between the model and the original will start to emerge until one point one is forced to admit that one is no longer dealing with a representation of the same person. What if it not an outsider interlocutor that comes upon this realization but the digital clone itself?

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Dana Gioia at The Book Haven:

I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthology. I didn’t recognize his name. I might have skipped over the section had I not noticed in the brief headnote that he had died in San Francisco by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As a Californian in exile, I found that grim and isolated fact intriguing.

I decided to read a poem or two. Instead, I read them all, with growing excitement and wonder. I recognized that I was reading a major poet. He was a head-spinning cocktail of contradictions, simultaneously satiric and terrifying, intimate and enigmatic. He used traditional forms with an experimental sensibility. He depicted apocalyptic outcomes with mordant humor. I had found the poet I had been searching for. Why had I never heard of him? Embarrassed by my ignorance, I decided to read everything I could find by and about him.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I had the rest of the weekend free. I drove to the main branch of the Minneapolis Public Library, heady with anticipation.

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Xiaoying You in Nature:

The ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker evaluated high-quality research on 74 current and emerging technologies this year, up from the 64 technologies it analysed last year. China is ranked number one for research on 66 of the technologies, including nuclear energy, synthetic biology and small satellites, and the United States topped the remaining 8, including quantum computing and geoengineering.

The results reflect a drastic reversal. At the beginning of this century, the United States led more than 90% of the assessed technologies, whereas China led less than 5% of them, according to the 2024 edition of the tracker.

“China has made incredible progress on science and technology that is reflected in research and development, as well as in publications,” says Ilaria Mazzocco, who researches China’s industrial policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-profit research organization based in Washington DC.

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Martin Filler at the NYRB:

The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined with a callow Postmodernism. Instead of trying to untangle those two discordant stylistic visions, which wastefully dominated American architectural discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed an exhilarating way forward with freeform designs that drew on advanced contemporary art as their primary source of inspiration. He made the world safe for oddball buildings, and whatever one might think of the idiosyncratic architecture by the generation who followed him—Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and their ilk—their careers would be unthinkable without the precedent he set.

Although his dramatic departure from architectural convention was at first confrontational and forbidding, it gradually became more buoyant and embracing. As his clients’ budgets increased and he moved from corrugated metal to shiny titanium, unfinished plywood to polished Douglas fir, and rubber matting to travertine flooring, his architecture lost none of its expressive power and appealed to many who’d found his earlier tough-guy efforts more alienating than audacious.

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Ivana Hughes in Common Dreams:

I write this from the front of a Columbia classroom in which about 60 first-year college students are taking the final exam for Frontiers of Science. Yes, it’s a Sunday, but the class is required of all Columbia College students and so having the exam on the weekend ensures that there won’t be conflicts with the exams for other courses they are taking. The 60 students in my classroom are a fraction of the nearly 740 taking the course this semester.

The exam began at 2 pm, less than 24 hours after the shooting at Brown University, and just hours after many of us learned about the shooting in Sydney, Australia. Given these devastating events, I offered this morning that anyone who was adversely affected could take the exam later in the week or take what at Columbia is called an incomplete, which means that they would take the final exam at the start of next semester and only then be assigned a grade. Only about two dozen students took this offer, some sharing personal stories about having close friends from childhood or high school among the victims at Brown. It makes sense that the high-achieving students that Columbia attracts would have high-achieving friends at Brown. Some also hail from Providence and have had impacted family members.

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Kristen French in Nautilus:

Social media can be tough to ignore these days. There is so much of it, and it’s so accessible, right there glowing on the phones in our pockets and purses. Many of us find ourselves scrolling through the feeds of friends, family, and so-called influencers more often than we might like (or like to admit).

But does that mean we’re addicted in a clinical sense, or just indulging a bad habit?

The distinction matters, it turns out. While the United States Surgeon General warned in early 2023 that excessive use of social media can have neurological effects similar to substance abuse, for most people, the language of addiction is neither accurate nor helpful, according to a recent study by a pair of researchers from the California Institution of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.

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Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter:

Artificial intelligence has produced a rare kind of popular curiosity. Not only among investors and founders, but among people who open a browser, type a question, and feel—however inaccurately—that something on the other side is thinking with them. That phenomenology matters. Whatever we think about hype, hallucinations, or OpenAI’s capitalization table, AI arrives as a technology whose uses are discovered after deployment, whose boundaries are porous, and whose side‑effects appear in places nobody designed for. “Generative” is not just a marketing word; it names a genuine instability.

For socialists, this instability poses a specific challenge. And their reflexes are familiar: Regulate platforms, tax windfalls, nationalize leading firms, plug their models into a planning apparatus. But if socialism is to be more than capitalism with nicer dashboards—if it really is a project of collectively remaking material life, not just of redistributing its outputs—it has to answer a harder question: Can it offer a better way of living with this technology than capitalism does? Can it deliver a distinct form of life worth wanting rather than just a fairer share of what capital has already made?

Once you pose the problem like this, something embarrassing appears. For a tradition obsessed with maximizing productive forces, socialism has been remarkably quick to bracket some of them from politics. It treats technology as a neutral kit to be dropped into better institutions once these exist. Take railways, nuclear plants, or language models: If capitalism misuses them, socialism promises to finally aim them at the common good. The real question, however, is whether even the most ambitious recent socialist theory escapes this limitation—or whether it reproduces neutrality at a higher level of sophistication.

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